About Kevin Shaw C.S.I.

Kevin Shaw C.S.I. has been color grading for 30 years, lives in England, and works all over the world as a colorist, restoration specialist, technologist, consultant and instructor. He has firsthand experience of HDR grading and is a big supporter. Kevin is equally at home working on DI Feature productions, TV episodic programming and for three years headed up the BBC S&PP restoration team. Prior to the software revolution he was a renowned telecine colorist, and worked with every model of the hardware da Vinci color correction systems up to and including the 2kPlus with Toolbox. In those days he concentrated on high-end commercials.

Kevin's colorist career started in 1985 in London at Telecine Ltd, where he quickly gained a reputation for his creativity working on music videos. He moved to SVC and then Rushes where he designed his own telecine suite and expanded his commercials work. In 1992 he moved to Milan, Italy to open a new grading facility for the Interactive Group, and a year later he moved to Zurich, Switzerland as Head of Telecine at Online Video. Kevin’s activities as both colorist and instructor led him to go freelance in 1995.

In the early 1990s da Vinci began using Kevin as their preferred instructor, and he ran their training program on a freelance basis. In 1998 the training became a full time task and Kevin joined da Vinci Systems in Florida, full time, to open the da Vinci Academy. He ran the da Vinci Academy and contributed to product design until 2004. By 2004 Kevin felt the need to get back in the colorist chair and work with clients again, so he left the company and turned freelance. He immediately focused on software grading and DI workflows. In 2009, he co-founded the International Colorist Academy (ICA) to share his knowledge and experiences with the growing new generation of software colorists. In 2012 Kevin took a lead role in building a new facility for the BBC to do digitisation, compliance editing and restoration. In 2016 is co-founder of Colorist Society International (CSI), which is the first organisation to represent professional colorists.

In addition to the training and grading work, Kevin has written many useful articles and presentations about color grading. Dolby, BBC Digital Media Services, Kodak labs, CBS Broadcast, Digital Vision, NARA and National Film Board of Canada are amongst the clients that he has consulted for.

He gained a BA (Hons) degree in Photography Film and Television in 1984, and worked as a stills photographer for a year, before finding his way into post-production. He is a member of the BKSTS. When he is not grading, teaching or writing, Kevin continues to pursue his interests in stills photography and naturally he is a competent Photoshop user!